X Marks The Everything App: A Judy Garland Apology Video

The AI generated Charlie and the Chocolate factory incident in Glascow was over a year ago. For those who don’t know, in early 2024 a company in Glascow advertised a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory theme park with ballpits and chocolate making and fun and advertised it all with blatant AI generated imagery. Parents were wrapped around the building, arms linked with crotch goblins salivating at the mouth at the chance to get their little pincers on some sweet, sweet chocolate. Turns out, as you can imagine, the whole thing was a sham. The attraction was an abandoned wallhouse with a tiny little ballpit and a cracked out ooma loompa. The situation was the laughing stock of the internet for months, the perfect congregation of stupidity, cynicism and intellectual property to captivate not just the heart but the soul of a chronically online teenager.

And as entertaining as looking back at what might’ve been one of my favorite weeks in internet history, I can’t help but think about how that honestly feels like it was a lifetime ago. And it got me thinking, got me ruminating, got me pondering, syllabating if you will, at a phenomena I’ve noticed among my generation… That each year feels a little longer than the last. That an hour of scrolling feels like an odd mix between a couple seconds and a million lifetimes.

“Surely,” I’ve caught myself thinking, the last month was two, the last year was three, the last decade was four, and then I remember, oh yes, I am seventeen years old. Not only is that mathematically impossible… but a smidgen arrogant of me.

And it got me thinking a lot about, uh, mass media and its effect on us. Day in and day out, I see people of my generation, myself not particularly excluded, kind of forced to care about every little piece of, and you’ll have to excuse my French here, dumb kinda fucking idiot bullshit. Y’know, every day I see people respond to Sabrina Carpenter’s choice of outfit with the same rage and ferocity as the genocide of millions all across the world. Or an artist bullied off the face of the planet for Regina George x Rodrick Heffley fanart while rapey racists and racey rapists sit in damn near every corner of the world, and I can’t help but think: What’s the point of any of this?

And, my god, I’m not saying analysis of art holds no place in a crumbling society, I’m saying that it’s no coincidence to me that what gets retweets and reposts and reblogs and repeats. Repeats. Repeats. Are the queer with tears, the artists who are autists, and the non-white that are deemed as blights getting into fights while they take away our rights.